Wednesday evening open thread—Twitter axes political ads
In an unexpected turn of events—and as a foil to Trevor's excellent Facebook piece this morning—Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter, announced in a series of tweets that his company was going to do away with political ads.
We’ve made the decision to stop all political advertising on Twitter globally. We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought. Why? A few reasons…🧵— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019
For instance, it‘s not credible for us to say: “We’re working hard to stop people from gaming our systems to spread misleading info, buuut if someone pays us to target and force people to see their political ad…well...they can say whatever they want! 😉”— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019
A final note. This isn’t about free expression. This is about paying for reach. And paying to increase the reach of political speech has significant ramifications that today’s democratic infrastructure may not be prepared to handle. It’s worth stepping back in order to address.— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) October 30, 2019
Now, if you follow me, you know I hold no love for Jack. His decisions have in large part made Twitter the cesspool it is.
However, Twitter is also an amazing tool for organizing mass movements. We're seeing that now, at this moment, in Lebanon and Iraq and Chile.These movements rely on a population being fed up with things as they are, fed up with being hopeless. They don't need to have paid Twitter ads to organize.
This is a good step in the right direction. As Facebook is accepting political ads which outright lie and claim that it isn't their problem to police whether the ads are truthful or factual, Twitter is just cutting out the root of the problem. If politicians and movements want to reach a wide audience, they'll have to do it the way any other Twitter user does it: by the power of their arguments.
Once this is all done, once we excise the cancer of Trumpism and neo-fascism, the thing we as a society—and by this I mean a global society, although the US will have an outsized role as the home of all major social media—will have to look seriously at how we do politics and how we disseminate information. We have in Russia a state actor whose weaponry relies on lies. And it has many emulators among the Illiberal Bloc. They should not be allowed to spread their lies in the public sphere. Free speech doesn't mean prevarication. If we can't agree on certain norms, democracy will not survive, or at the very best be hemmed in, under constant attack.
I'll still look side-eye at Jack Dorsey. But this is a welcome step. Maybe his counterpart at Facebook might learn a lesson.